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Page 23
Simon would not have been horrified, Alinor thought, chuckling while tears ran down her face. He would have bewailed her lack of morality aloud while his eyes laughed at her. Who would have believed that Ian was not old enough to accept that the flesh had its own laws, and they had little to do with the heart or mind? Yet look at his reaction to a most natural accident. Unless they were willing to use the common whores, men engaged in military actions were deprived of women. Alinor was fairly certain that Ian had little need to use a whore under ordinary circumstances; there would be plenty of willing fine ladies. She was also sure that he would recoil from using the filthy creatures that serviced the men-at-arms in a military camp. She understood that when a strong young man had been continent for months, the slightest thing, the lightest touch, would wake his body. She would have laughed and forgotten it had Ian himself not been so appalled at his reaction to ''Simon's wife."
"I am not only Simon's wife," Alinor sobbed softly. "I am Alinor."

Some hours later and many miles away, across the narrow sea, a sweet, rich voice suddenly developed an ugly snarl, interrupting itself in the midst of a sentence to ask, "What did you say about Pembroke?"
The man addressed did not blanch, even though King John seemed angry; he laughed. "I said, my lord, that we did not miss him in the taking of Montauban or in our other ventures. We did not miss him nor that mighty and sanctimonious man of his hands, Simon Lemagne, whom your brother leaned upon so heavily."
William, Earl of Salisbury, the king's bastard half brother, straightened from his bored slouch and shook his head. He was a little the worse for wine, a condition not uncommon with him when the king and his cronies gathered. It was easier, Salisbury had discovered, not to hear too clearly when he was a little befuddled. Nor-

 
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